Several applications require the means for individuals to easily locate targets of interest over large geographic regions. For example, airports span thousands of acres in extent and birds approaching active runways and critical aircraft flight corridors pose a significant hazard to aviation safety. If a trained wildlife biologist can locate such birds in a timely manner and respond to them, pyrotechnics or other techniques can be used to persuade the birds to alter their course, reducing the risk of bird strikes with aircraft. Or consider law enforcement personnel patrolling vast waterways to protect against criminal activity. If suspicious or threatening target activity can be detected and if such targets can be easily located, response vessels can successfully interdict them.
However, providing response personnel with the means to easily locate such targets of interest is anything but simple. Prior art systems include sensors carried by individuals, sensors mounted on the platforms they ride on, and sensors deployed throughout the entire region of interest.
Sensors carried by individuals include binoculars, cameras and night-vision goggles. While these help improve a user's natural vision with the ability to zoom to distant targets and allowing targets to be seen at night, they are labor intensive and difficult to use when multiple targets are present over vast areas at different ranges, bearings and altitudes. Each target must be searched out, one at a time, adjusting direction and zoom factor for each one; and accurate latitude, longitude, and altitude (or azimuth, elevation, range) coordinates are generally not available. The sensor's maximum range is also limited; and at an airport, for instance, view will be blocked by urban structures such as airport terminal buildings. As a result, targets such as birds will only be seen in the vicinity of the user, unless multiple persons are deployed around the airport at all times, which is expensive. Finally, target information can not be easily shared with other remote users unless high-bandwidth network links are provided to move video, for example, from a head-mounted camera to a remote user; and multiple remote users can not independently control the user-carried sensor for their own viewing purposes.
A platform-mounted sensor such as radar mounted on an agile police vessel carrying a few police officers is also limited in performance. Line of sight coverage is limited (because of the low height above the water available for mounting the sensor) to within a few kilometers of the vessel. If the police vessel responds at night by chasing a target of interest, radar performance will severely degrade due to the impact of vessel dynamics on sensor performance, resulting in target loss. A large number of vessels with radars are needed to monitor vast water areas, making such a system extremely expensive. And the display of targets by the vessel radar is not user-centric; rather it is vessel-centric (e.g. heads-up display) or north-centric (north-up display) making it more difficult for individual users to understand their situation, and stay locked on assigned targets, especially in crowded target environments.
Radar networks have been deployed around airports and vast waterways in recent years to provide wide-area surveillance of bird and aircraft targets in the air around airports, and small vessels on the water, respectively. A common operating picture (COP) display which provides a combined, earth-coordinates view of targets as seen by the sensor network has greatly increased situational awareness to centralized operators who have a birds-eye or earth-centric view of the entire geographic area represented by a map with targets overlaid on top. While this earth-centric view is valuable to centralized operators, it is lacking for individual responders who are on the move and attempting to respond to particular targets of interest. The position and orientation of the responder is often not captured by the COP; and transforming from an earth-centric display to a user-centric display coupled with directing one's eyes to visually acquire a target of interest is difficult and non-intuitive. As a result, finding targets of interest with the aid of the COP is very challenging.
The present invention seeks to overcome the aforementioned limitations by providing and integrating new capabilities to enable users to easily visualize and locate targets of interest in a manner analogous to how their natural vision functions, using a personal electronic vision device (PEVD).